Schmitt, Harold (Hal)

ORAL HISTORY OF HAROLD SCHMITT
Interviewed by Keith McDaniel
March 12, 2012
MR. MCDANIEL: This is Keith McDaniel, and today is March the 12th, 2012, and I am in the home of Mr. Harold Schmitt, or Hal, I guess, as people know you. Hal, thank you so much for letting us come in and talk to you.
MR. SCHMITT: Glad to be here. Glad to have you, Keith.
MR. MCDANIEL: Thank you. I usually like to start at the very beginning, learn something about someone's history and their past and let's start at -- Tell me where you were born and raised and something about your family.
MR. SCHMITT: Well, I'm a native Texan. I was born in Seguin, Texas, little town about 30 miles from San Antonio, in South Texas. It’s an agricultural community. Population when I was growing up was about 4,000. [Laughter]
MR. MCDANIEL: Seguin is the name of it?
MR. SCHMITT: Seguin is the name of it. S-E-G-U-I-N. Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: So it's a small Texas farming town, then.
MR. SCHMITT: Pretty much.
MR. MCDANIEL: Or ranching town, I should say.
MR. SCHMITT: My dad was a manager of the milling company there. It was a flour and feed mill, and they bought grain from the surrounding farmers and others and made flour and feed, and sold it to the retail stores.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, what year were you born?
MR. SCHMITT: I was born in 1928, August 11, 1928.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you were a Depression child, weren't you?
MR. SCHMITT: I was a Depression child.
MR. SCHMITT: And we knew it. Oh, yeah. The name of the game in those days was to save money and to economize just wherever you could.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Now what about your father, when he was at the -- Did the mill continue to operate?
MR. SCHMITT: Yes it did, yes it did, and being in food-related stuff, it was more or less Depression-resistant. Not completely, of course, but --
MR. MCDANIEL: Everybody had to eat.
MR. SCHMITT: Everybody had to eat, and he was glad to be in that business.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I bet he was. Did he grow up on a farm? I mean did he --
MR. SCHMITT: Yes, he did. He grew up on a small farm in that general area.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right? Okay. So you were in, you said 30 miles south of -
MR. SCHMITT: No, 30 miles east of San Antonio.
MR. MCDANIEL: I guess you got used to the heat, didn't you?
MR. SCHMITT: Oh, yeah, sure. [Laughter]
MR. MCDANIEL: Those hot Texas summers.
MR. SCHMITT: Yes, indeed.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you grew up. Did you have brothers and sisters?
MR. SCHMITT: I did not. I was the only child. Those were Depression days, and a lot of small families. My dad was one of five brothers, and between them, they had seven children.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really? Oh, wow.
MR. SCHMITT: So not many.
MR. MCDANIEL: Not many. So where did you go to school?
MR. SCHMITT: Went to school in Seguin. Grade school initially. In those days, we had seven years in grade school and four years in high school, so it was an 11 year system, not 12 year system like we have now. But he had a wonderful opportunity for him to go to Dallas, in a management position there, and did. That was the summer of 1944, the summer before my senior year in high school. So I had my last year in Dallas at North Dallas High School, and I graduated there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see, I see. So Dallas was the big city for a country boy, wasn't it?
MR. SCHMITT: Yeah. [Laughter] When I first saw their course catalog, I was overwhelmed. It was a tabloid-sized kind of newspaper thing, with course listings in fine print over all those pages, and I thought, "My goodness."
MR. MCDANIEL: For the high school?
MR. SCHMITT: For the high school.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. Now, how many students were, let's say, in your graduating class at North Dallas?
MR. SCHMITT: At North Dallas, in graduating class, were about -- I'd have to think. There were about 2,000 students in the high school, and probably 400 and something, maybe 500.
MR. MCDANIEL: 400 or 500, maybe something like that, which was significantly bigger than the school at Seguin.
MR. SCHMITT: My graduating class in Seguin -- and I've been back to a couple of reunions, but -- my graduating class there was about 60.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
[Laughter]
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow, so your family moved to Dallas?
MR. SCHMITT: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: And went to North Dallas High School and you graduated there in what year?
MR. SCHMITT: In 1945.
MR. MCDANIEL: 1945, so the war was going on when you were in high school.
MR. SCHMITT: The war was going on while I was in high school, and I have to say, those were very patriotic times, and all us high school boys were frustrated, because we weren't old enough to go into the military. Everybody wanted to go into the military, and that was kind of an interesting time.
MR. MCDANIEL: So what were your plans after high school? Did you plan to join the military, or go to college, or…?
MR. SCHMITT: Well, no. There was an opportunity for me to go to Southern Methodist University, which is in Dallas, and I did. I did go there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now how did that come about? Did you have a scholarship?
MR. SCHMITT: Yes, I had a scholarship. It was a competitive scholarship for seniors in Dallas. So, I had a scholarship to go there and I started in the Engineering College. Started out to be an engineer. Decided after one semester I really didn't want to be in engineering, and much preferred the science part of it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. SCHMITT: Yes, and I changed my major over to Physics.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you went to -- Did you go right into college after high school?
MR. SCHMITT: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: So the fall of '45?
MR. SCHMITT: Yes, I did.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is when you -- So I imagine that there was a big change in the country between your senior year of high school and your freshman year of college, because that's when the war ended.
MR. SCHMITT: Absolutely.
MR. MCDANIEL: Or right in that time.
MR. SCHMITT: Absolutely. Well, it did. It ended, of course, in the summer of '45, and the world was different. The main thing that affected college life, then, was the returning veteran population. People who had served in the military, and there was the GI Bill, which brought a lot of them back to college. And so the colleges were overloaded. As a matter of fact, in SMU's case, some of the -- They didn't really have all the student help that they needed, and so they were glad when somebody came along that was willing to help grade papers or do any of the menial stuff. [Laughter]
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly. The professors are too busy to do.
MR. SCHMITT: But they had their hands full dealing with all the veterans that came back.
MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure. I'm sure they did. So after your first year of engineering, you decided that you liked science. What was it about science that attracted you?
MR. SCHMITT: What about science? Well, probably what attracts most people into science. You want to know how the world works [Laughter]. You think you have an opportunity maybe to find out some things, and do some things, that advance knowledge a little bit. That was the thing. Also, the Head of the Physics Department offered me a part-time job while I was a student there [Laughter] at SMU. That probably had something to do with it. I liked him, and he was tough. He was a tough academician, but I liked him, and worked for him for probably a year. Because I didn't start till after my freshman year.
MR. MCDANIEL: Fix your tie for me there a little bit. Just -- It'll look nicer that way.
MR. SCHMITT: Thank you. Sure.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you worked for him in the Science Department I suppose? Now, you know this was the birth of the Atomic Age. The world found out about Oak Ridge in the summer of '45 -- the nuclear weapon, things such as that. Was that any -- Did that contribute to your interest in science? Were you interested in that?
MR. SCHMITT: I don't think that did, particularly, Keith, but I did begin to develop an interest in the nuclear side of science, and what is this about nuclei and how do they go together and all the usual stuff we talk about.
MR. MCDANIEL: And I'm sure over time, those things were starting --
MR. SCHMITT: To develop.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- to develop, too, and people were starting to study it and learn more about it and things such as that, so that was probably just a natural progression.
MR. SCHMITT: It was kind of a natural progression for me, yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you graduated from SMU.
MR. SCHMITT: No, I didn't.
MR. MCDANIEL: No, you didn't. Okay, well tell me.
MR. SCHMITT: I only had two years there. I played tennis while I was at SMU. [Laughter]
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see, I see.
MR. SCHMITT: That was in my second year. Was never a championship player, but was good enough to letter. [Laughter]
MR. MCDANIEL: There you go.
MR. SCHMITT: Anyway, yeah, so --
MR. MCDANIEL: But you left SMU?
MR. SCHMITT: So I left SMU after two years and went to the University of Texas, and essentially finished everything there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, where was the University of Texas?
MR. SCHMITT: University of Texas was in Austin. It's the main campus. And I got a -- I actually got my first bachelor's degree in 1948, with a mathematics major, and then they had a degree called B.S. in Physics -- bachelors of science in physics -- and got that degree in '49, master's degree in '52, and Ph.D. in '54, all from the University of Texas.
MR. MCDANIEL: So did you stay there the whole time to do all that work? I'm sure you stayed there to get your master's.
MR. SCHMITT: Through master's. And then, I had an opportunity in one of the -- actually, one of the first co-op programs between the DOE labs and a university. And I was able to finish my coursework at UT, Austin, and then go to Los Alamos to do my dissertation, to participate in one of the experimental physics groups out there. Yeah. I did my dissertation there and finished the Ph.D.
MR. MCDANIEL: What was your dissertation on?
MR. SCHMITT: My dissertation was on the ionization-- energy ionization relationships for fission fragments. And the reason that was important was because ionization chambers were used so much in detection of nuclear particles overall, but fission fragments in particular, and there was not much known about that relationship, so--
MR. MCDANIEL: So did you do groundbreaking work? Was it considered -- [Laughter]
MR. SCHMITT: I wouldn't call it that.
MR. MCDANIEL: It was interesting though, wasn't it?
MR. SCHMITT: But it was interesting, and it confirmed a number of people's speculation that there was what's called an ionization defect. No point in getting too technical here, but what was called an ionization defect was suspected by people, and my thesis was to make measurements, make direct measurements, that would essentially confirm or deny that that was real. So we did that.
MR. MCDANIEL: So it was a small step forward in science.
MR. SCHMITT: It was a small step, yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: But it was a step forward.
MR. SCHMITT: It was a step forward.
MR. MCDANIEL: At least you confirmed it, you know? [Laughter]
MR. SCHMITT: That's right, that's right. Yeah, common wisdom is that if you can add a little drop to the bucket of knowledge, you have accomplished something.
MR. MCDANIEL: And a lot of those drops turn into something measurable, I suppose. So you went to Los Alamos, where you worked and finished your dissertation.
MR. SCHMITT: Yes, I did.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, how long were you at Los Alamos? And tell me something about what you were doing there.
MR. SCHMITT: Well, okay. My dissertation involved the study of fission, and the way you make fission, of course, is with neutrons, so I worked at the reactor sites in Los Alamos for my dissertation. I had had summer jobs at Los Alamos. My first summer job was in 1949, after I got my bachelor's degree, and I just applied -- They had started a summer program, I think the year before, maybe two years before, and brought students there from essentially all over the country. Well, I was fortunate to get one of those positions in the summer of '49, and then ended up going, in the summers of '49, '50, and '51. But what I did during those summer jobs was, I worked with a test group in high explosives, and I learned about high explosives [Laughter]. I learned more about explosives than I wanted to know, but it was fascinating. Oh yeah, really fascinating work.
MR. MCDANIEL: Was it, really?
MR. SCHMITT: Oh, yeah, really fascinating. The name of the game, and at that time, in that connection, was to make the bomb smaller, smaller in size than the first versions. The earlier ones were like 60 inches in diameter, overall. The goal was to try to make tactical weapons that would be maybe the size of a basketball, if you could do that. Well, we got down to maybe half again the size of a basketball [Laughter]. But the group I worked in was a group that tested the components of the high explosive components of the bomb, and it was a very interesting job.
MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure it was, but once you got there, working on your Ph.D., at least you've been there, you're familiar with the area. You kind of knew what you were getting into.
MR. SCHMITT: Yes, I did.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, how long were you at Los Alamos? You finished your Ph.D.
MR. SCHMITT: Right, and went there full-time in '52. Got my degree in spring of '54, and left in the fall of '54.
MR. MCDANIEL: And where did you go from Los Alamos?
MR. SCHMITT: To Oak Ridge.
MR. MCDANIEL: Tell me about that. What opportunity did you have here?
MR. SCHMITT: Well, like the hundreds of other people, you sort of look around where the jobs are, and what's available. The job in Oak Ridge, the thing that really attracted me here, was I could come and join the Physics Division, and do basic research, and they said, "You can come and start in this group over here." It was associated with the High Voltage Laboratory. So I could start with a group there, but then, essentially, you have freedom to decide your own project and do your own thing. There were not too many of those positions. There were, at the Laboratory, probably 100 or 200 in the Laboratory, in the Physics Division and Chemistry Division and maybe some other places. But I really liked that idea. I liked the idea of coming to a place that had just wonderful facilities, experimental facilities, and I could do some experiments and things that I had had ideas for back during my thesis research. And after I'd been here a year or so, was encouraged to do that, by Art Snell, who was Physics Division Director at that time.
MR. MCDANIEL: So what did you have to do? Did you have to put together a proposal, and present it?
MR. SCHMITT: No, things were much easier in that respect in those days. Yeah. The administrative stuff really was taken care of pretty much by the administrators, and we were told, "Your job is to do good science."
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. SCHMITT: That's right. Very appealing to a young physicist.
MR. MCDANIEL: I imagine that'd be very appealing to just about anybody, wouldn't it?
MR. SCHMITT: I think so.
MR. MCDANIEL: Especially a young, imaginative scientist who had lots of ideas. So, well, good. So you came here in the fall of '54. And you probably started kind of your own kind of research a year or so later.
MR. SCHMITT: That's right.
MR. MCDANIEL: How long did that last and what did you do? Tell me something about that.
MR. SCHMITT: Well, that lasted 19 years [Laughter].
MR. MCDANIEL: Did it really? Okay. Until about '73 or so.
MR. SCHMITT: About '73.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, and you had opportunities to do a lot of different types of research.
MR. SCHMITT: Lot of different things. I got very interested in -- Let me say, most of that. Two things. The first part, we did some interesting neutron capture studies, neutron capture cross-sections, that had a relationship to the Big Bang Theory and the way elements were formed at the formation of the universe. So those -- I mean those cross-sections were useful, at least in that respect, as well as in some practical things, too. Besides which, there were nuclear theories that related to that, and made some predictions that mostly other people took the data and created the early part that could be tested. Then, I got interested in the physics of the fission process, in other words, what actually happens when a nucleus fissions? There were two --
MR. MCDANIEL: And for those non-scientists who are watching this, explain what fission is.
MR. SCHMITT: Nuclear fission is the splitting of a heavy nucleus. As a matter of fact, in general, it just means the splitting of a nucleus, usually into two fragments. That's really all it means, but as a practical matter, it occurs mostly with heavy elements, and when you get heavy enough, you can have spontaneous fission. That is where some of the time, a nucleus just decides to split, and does so. It happens in Californium 252 for example is a common fission source. Anyway, you can induce nuclear fission with thermal neutrons, and we did that with the U-235, U-233, plutonium 239, and other elements. So anyway, the physics I was interested in was how the nucleus splits, and there were two major theories. One was that the nucleus is just -- when you excite it, for example, with a neutron -- that it is so hot that it just blows apart. And it happens to blow apart in two pieces. But there was another theory, and the other theory was that a nucleus deforms a little bit more slowly than that, and like a liquid drop, and just gradually necks down and --
MR. MCDANIEL: And then separates, sure.
MR. SCHMITT: -- and then splits. Now, John Wheeler, whose name people may know, and Niels Bohr, developed the liquid drop model for fission. That was fine, and it gave about the right energetics, and so on. But its problem was that it predicted a roughly symmetric mass distribution. That is, it predicted a ratio of fragment masses that was about one. And that was a problem, because the observed mass distributions had very asymmetric peaks. So the other theory was, "Okay, there must be some fragment shell effects." These so-called nuclear shell effects that take hold and cause a conglomeration of protons and neutrons into these asymmetric configurations. Well, anyway --
MR. MCDANIEL: So they were different. So they ended up being different sizes.
MR. SCHMITT: They're in different sizes. So we -- I thought this would be an interesting field to study, and we studied that six ways from Sunday. [Laughter] A lot of really interesting experiments. We ended up with, from that group in the Physics Department, probably 80 or so publications in that field. Yeah, so it turned out to be very, very beneficial.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, I want to go back, because we've got you up to about '73 or so. I know you made a big change in your life in '73, or thereabouts. So, let's go back and talk about your family. Now, when you were in Texas, were you married?
MR. SCHMITT: No, Jonell and I got married in 1952. I better get that right [Laughter]. 1952. May of '52.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you were at Los Alamos?
MR. SCHMITT: I had gone to Los Alamos at the beginning of the year, and we knew we were going to get married. We got married in May, and set up housekeeping there, and had our first few years in Los Alamos.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, where did you meet your wife?
MR. SCHMITT: I met her at the University. I was in graduate school. She was actually working at the University at that time.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you all -- Now, so you came to Oak Ridge, you said, in '54, fall of '54. Now, did you all have children when you came to Oak Ridge?
MR. SCHMITT: No, no, we did not. We had our first child in '57 -- 1957.
MR. MCDANIEL: So when you came to Oak Ridge, where did you live?
MR. SCHMITT: We lived in the Garden Apartments.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, did you?
MR. SCHMITT: Matter of fact, had our first two children there, '57 and let me think about that now. Yeah, '57 and '60. And in January, '61, we moved into this house, which we had built during the calendar year of 1960.
MR. MCDANIEL: So in '61, you moved into where you are now?
MR. SCHMITT: Yep.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, did you have more children? Or did you just have the two?
MR. SCHMITT: We had our third daughter in 1963. So '57, '60, and '63.
MR. MCDANIEL: And they grew up in Oak Ridge, went through the school system, and --
MR. SCHMITT: Grew up in Oak Ridge, very proud graduates of the Oak Ridge High School.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, good, good. I mean what -- And we'll get back here to your work in a minute, but let's talk a little bit more about that. I mean, what was Oak Ridge like to live in in the ‘60s and ‘70s, because that's really -- Well, the late ‘50s through --
MR. SCHMITT: Late ‘50s onward? You know, course we had lived in Los Alamos, and there are a lot of similarities in the communities between Oak Ridge and Los Alamos, so we were more or less used to the various governmental aspects of the town.
MR. MCDANIEL: And the educated folks and what they bring to a community. There's so much that they bring, so I'm sure it was similar of Los Alamos as it was in Oak Ridge.
MR. SCHMITT: It was. And Oak Ridge -- probably still is, but in those days, it was a stimulating town to live in, because there were all these interesting things going on, whatever you talked about with anybody was interesting. When you're young, you're like a sponge, and you just absorb all that. And we did. Jonell is a journalist, and she worked for a while at the News Sentinel, actually, and then got pregnant with our first child, and so she left that work, much later went back to work at the Oak Ridger. It was as editor of the entertainment section for probably eight years or so, seven or eight years. Then, left that, but then still later, went back as a copy editor. So she's kind of inbred in the Oak Ridger system.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure, I understand. Well, good. And I'm sure there were lots of opportunities for your children in Oak Ridge to do different things. Arts and athletics, and all those kinds of things.
MR. SCHMITT: And we try to encourage them to follow their interests and do what they were interested in.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right, now, where are your children now?
MR. SCHMITT: We have one in Atlanta, one in Dallas, and one in Orange County, California. [Laughter]
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right? Are any of them scientists? Did any of them follow in your footsteps?
MR. SCHMITT: No, they did not. They chose not to go into a scientific field. Don't know why. I think they just didn't develop that interest. We tried to encourage -- I tried to encourage them, but not too hard. I mean because I really wanted them to develop their own interests, and they did. Carol, our oldest, is, was, but till she retired, or left -- actually, she left. But she was a teacher, and she taught mathematics and French. She had three children. And Laine, our middle one, is a public relations person. She went into advertising and became sort of -- well, had a career in Atlanta, in the planning side of advertising. She had two kids. And Joy became an attorney, and after a while, she worked in the corporate law department of J.C. Penney for a while, about six or seven years, and then decided she liked the idea of running her own business. So she got out of that, bought two franchises, and went into that. She, in the meantime, had her own family, her own two kids.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well good, good. Now, let's go back to your professional career. In the early ‘70s, things started -- You started discovering some things at your job that kind of influenced your future, so talk a little bit about that.
MR. SCHMITT: Well, you know that we formed the company ORTEC in -- that was 1960 that we formed that company.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's right, well, let's go back to when you formed that. Yeah. Exactly.
MR. SCHMITT: Yeah, and that sort of came out of our work with nuclear fission, because we were, as part of that work, we were developing new kinds of detectors and trying new things and these semi-conductor detectors just showed enormous promise for our field, but also for other fields, various places. People started using them. In my group, we started making detectors for any research group that wanted them. Finally got really got kind of overloaded with that. Well, you know this story.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, but I want you to tell it. Tell what happened. I want to hear how you got overloaded with that, and then you tried to -- what you tried to do and kind of how ORTEC came to be because of that. I want you to tell me that story.
MR. SCHMITT: Well, that's [Laughter] that was a transitional story, I have to say. Yeah. I had a technician, his name was Dave Peach. I got Dave to sort of be our detector guy. He made the detectors for our experiments and so on. But then, other people in the Physics Division decided, "Hey, they could use these detectors in their experiments," and "Would you make detectors for me?" "Well, sure, of course we would." So we did that. And then we started getting requests from other labs -- Word got out as people published papers, went to conferences and give talks and stuff. The word gets out, so other people wanted these detectors, too, so they would ask us, and we made detectors for them. That all started in the late 50s. After a little while, our lab just got overloaded with those kinds of requests.
MR. MCDANIEL: You were doing more of that than you could with your other work, right?
MR. SCHMITT: Well, our technician certainly could, and we were trying to keep it in balance, but it was getting harder. So upshot, finally I thought, "Well, you know, if I had another technician, then we could satisfy those demands as well as our own." So I asked our Division Director, who was Joe Fowler at the time, and I said, "You know, Joe, can we have another technician?" He knew what was going on. Our offices were down the hall from each other, so--
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, exactly.
MR. SCHMITT: But anyway, he said, "Well, sorry, but the Physics Division budget just couldn't -- I'm sorry."
MR. MCDANIEL: No, you're good.
MR. SCHMITT: Physics Division budget just couldn't accommodate another technician, and could we find another way to do it? Well, the obvious thing to do is to get the Instrumentation Division involved, the Instrumentation and Controls Division, who were making detectors of all kinds for the other groups in the Lab. So I asked them, and bottom line of that story was that they didn't want to get involved. They thought the detectors were just a flash in the pan, and they didn't want to be involved. Well, it was okay. They had their own fish to fry. [Laughter] So, that was about it for trying to get detectors made within the Laboratory framework.
MR. MCDANIEL: But there was a huge demand. I mean, it was becoming a nuclear lab, and all over, really, from -- You're getting it from other labs and other people.
MR. SCHMITT: We never really looked at it as a business. I looked at it during all that period. I looked at it as a service that the Laboratory could do for science, nationwide, or even worldwide. Anyway, so that didn't work. Finally, my close colleague and friend John Neiler and I talked about it, and we said, "You know, maybe we could just start a company." Well, first we thought about getting detectors made outside, but then we realized, "Okay, whoever we got to make these detectors, we would have to supervise so closely, because there were some intricate steps in there, and all of that." And we said, "As long as we are going to have to supervise anyway, let's just start a little company off to the side here, and see if we can meet the demand that way. Well, anyway, so John and I talked about it, and we said, "Okay." But then there was a group, six of us actually, that ate lunch pretty regularly together out there at ORNL. And we said, "Let's just talk to the group about it." So, okay, we did. And everybody said, "Oh, that's a good idea," and they immediately recognized the problems about having the detectors made in house. So, they were very sympathetic, but enthusiastic for maybe trying to work on it, and they encouraged us, but I thought -- and I guess we all thought, really -- that we ought to get management's blessing, because you have to remember, in those days -- this is now 1959 or so, '60 -- we belonged to the Laboratory, essentially body and soul, you know?
MR. MCDANIEL: And the work that you did at the Laboratory belonged to the Laboratory.
MR. SCHMITT: And the work we did, absolutely. And we took that enthusiastically. That was not a reluctant thing at all. Because we liked belonging to the Lab, and all of that. But we realized that this was a little bit out of the ordinary, a little bit offline, and so let's ask the management about it. So the first thing we did --
MR. MCDANIEL: And let me just interrupt. This was before the concept of technology transfer, wasn't it?
MR. SCHMITT: Oh, this was long before. Nobody had even heard of technology transfer. [Laughter]
MR. SCHMITT: So first thing was that we talked to Joe Fowler, who was our Division Director, and Joe said, "Golly." He said, "I don't know, you better go talk to the Director's Office." He directed us to Mansel Ramsey, who was an associate director -- I think his title was Associate Director for Administration or something like that. Nice guy. But anyway. So we went to see him. We went to see Mansel, and he said, "I don't think there'd be any problem with that." He said, "We have electricians who have their own business off on the side." He just sort of reeled off some examples of people that had side businesses that had nothing to do with Laboratory employment. And we said we'd make it clear we'll have nothing to do with employment. We won't use Laboratory facilities. And whether or not ORNL buys any of these things won’t matter; we don't care. Anyways, so Mansel said he didn't think there'd be a problem, but he'd like to get it legally reviewed. So we said, "Sure, of course." Well, we kind of expected that. He asked us to write it out, write up a plan sort of thing, so we did that. It wasn't very complicated, and our ideas weren't that well formulated anyway. So he said, "Okay, I'll take this and we'll get it reviewed." And he did. I asked for, in our request, I asked for a written response, so that we'd have it in the file that this was okay, because I didn't want either me or any of us involved to get fired because [Laughter] we had done something that was against Laboratory policy and what have you. Mansel said that he didn't think that would be a problem, but he would talk to the lawyers. He came back and said he had talked to the lawyers. The lawyers said, "It's okay," but they wouldn't send a written response, so I wrote a letter and said, "Now, we understand…" You get the idea. So, long and short of that was that the lawyer in the Corporate Legal Department wrote us a letter anyway, saying it was all okay. [Laughter]
MR. MCDANIEL: Good, good, that's great. Did you ever need that letter later?
MR. SCHMITT: No, no. No, really never did.
MR. MCDANIEL: Probably, by this time, the people that needed to know knew what was going on.
MR. SCHMITT: I think so, yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you had this idea to start this business, and you and your friend, your colleague, and then the four others -- your lunch buddies -- you decided to -- You got your permission, and then what happened?
MR. SCHMITT: Then, we said okay, well, then, if we're going to do this, we have to first of all get some money, because we're going to have to buy some supplies and all of that.
MR. MCDANIEL: And where were you going to do it? You know you had to have a place.
MR. SCHMITT: Have to have a place.
MR. MCDANIEL: This is something you guys were doing part-time, after work, I imagine.
MR. SCHMITT: Oh it was, or weekends.
MR. MCDANIEL: You didn't have any -- Yeah, that’s what I mean, weekends.
MR. SCHMITT: Evenings and weekends. Yeah, it was an evenings and weekend activity.
MR. MCDANIEL: So how did you raise your money, and how much did you need?
MR. SCHMITT: Well, we actually got Jim Blankenship, who was working on detectors in the I and C Division. He couldn't come in because of a prohibition on investment by employees of that division. But he helped us form a budget, before he knew that that would happen. He helped us form a budget, and we looked at that, and when it turned out he couldn't join in with us, we got John Walter interested, and John said sure. He looked at the budget and he said, "Yeah, that'll work." And that budget was $14,000.00.
MR. MCDANIEL: $14,000.00 in 1959. That was a lot of money in 1959.
MR. SCHMITT: It was a lot of money, yeah. It was a lot of money, but it was doable, and we figured we'd make it even more doable, so we set up $500.00 investments, and anybody could come in.
MR. MCDANIEL: Anybody could come in, right.
MR. SCHMITT: Well, yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: How'd that go?
MR. SCHMITT: That went--
MR. MCDANIEL: That went well?
MR. SCHMITT: Yeah, yeah, not 100 percent smoothly, because you remember the culture. The culture was that association with business and industry was kind of dirty. That was a little bit suspect, if you did that.
MR. MCDANIEL: So did you have some backlash from colleagues and people that worked?
MR. SCHMITT: Yeah, but it wasn't terribly bad. Oh, there were people who thought it was terrible that this could be done or would be done, that anybody would do that.
MR. MCDANIEL: What was their argument?
MR. SCHMITT: There were people who knew. There were people who really -- But at least nobody campaigned, I'll put it that way. Maybe had discussions out somewhere, and occasionally would hear about something, but nobody campaigned against us, and we just sort of went on. We didn't try to persuade people away from their viewpoint. We just accepted it and went on, went on to other people. But there were 29 people who were willing to invest $500.00 toward it [Laughter].
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, well that's good, that's good.
MR. SCHMITT: Yeah, and so that's how we got started.
MR. MCDANIEL: And ORTEC. You came up with -- How'd the name ORTEC come to be?
MR. SCHMITT: Of course, that was funny. In this group of six, everybody had all kinds of ideas for names. We never could find anything. We wanted something that would give us an umbrella name, but still not be too cute. Would be eye-catching, maybe, but not be too cute and all that. Make a long story short, at one of our little lunch gatherings, John Neiler came up with the idea of Oak Ridge Technical Enterprises Corporation. ORTEC. Oak Ridge Technical Enterprises Corporation.
MR. MCDANIEL: So that gave you kind of an umbrella in case you wanted to do other things, later on, down the road --
MR. SCHMITT: And we actually talked about that, because we had some other ideas for products and so on, and especially if the detector business didn't really materialize, which, of course, it did.
MR. MCDANIEL: Of course. So you started this in 1960. Where did you do your work, when you first started?
MR. SCHMITT: At 901 Turnpike [Laughter].
MR. MCDANIEL: 901 Turnpike. Where was that?
MR. SCHMITT: That's now the Turnell -- What --
MR. MCDANIEL: Tunnell. The Tunnell Building.
MR. SCHMITT: Thank you. Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you started there.
MR. SCHMITT: We had started in two rooms, which we had to renovate and fix up with water and plumbing and electricity and all of that. Ken Thermond was the managing partner of the partnership that owned the building, and Ken was a good landlord.
MR. MCDANIEL: Was he?
MR. SCHMITT: Yeah, he was. We worked all that stuff out. We worked out a deal with him where he would -- Actually, he put in the plumbing, but we paid for it over a year with increased rent and then the rent would drop back after the first year.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, well good. That's good. Now, so, did all six of you work nights and weekends and --
MR. SCHMITT: Pretty much, yep. Pretty much, and we'd divide -- We had a division of labor. I mean we had two guys who were concentrating on the sales aspect and developing customer lists and so on. Two guys who worked on the production and production aspects of the detectors, and two others who were engineers -- one worked on the electronics, and one worked on the mechanics. So we had it pretty well covered. My job was to catch whatever fell between the cracks, and then try to keep it coordinated and watch the budget and all that stuff.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure, sure. So, how long did that go on like that?
MR. SCHMITT: Well, let's see. June to -- It went on for about a year, but June to March, very intensely, and in March 1961 we decided we needed help.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. You needed an employee or two.
MR. SCHMITT: So we hired some -- Yes, we did. We hired some technical employees to actually make the detectors, who we could supervise. And then we began to look for a president, and ultimately found Tom Yount, who came in, did a marvelous job.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you were still working at the Lab?
MR. SCHMITT: I worked at the Lab all through that.
MR. MCDANIEL: All through that whole process. Okay. Now, and then eventually, eventually, ORTEC grew and you started developing other businesses.
MR. SCHMITT: John Neiler actually left the Laboratory to become Vice-President and Technical Director in ORTEC, and Tom Emmer left to do the electronics in ORTEC. John Walter left to do detectors, and do that side of it. The rest of us stayed at the Laboratory. Yeah, we did.
MR. MCDANIEL: Stayed at the Lab. Now, once you started building your client list, who were your clients? Were other laboratories, universities, research facilities --
MR. SCHMITT: Universities and research facilities, yeah. Yeah, the market for these detectors is a research market. But all kinds of research, so yeah, our customers were -- One of the first ones was Rice University. One of the first ones was one of the GE Labs, I forget which one. Who else? I could look it up.
MR. MCDANIEL: But ORTEC grew, and you eventually built your own building, I suppose, at some point, didn't you?
MR. SCHMITT: Yeah, that's after Tom came and sales were growing and it looked like it was a real business. Yeah, then we built the ORTEC building, which is out there at the corner of Illinois and Lafayette.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is the building still there?
MR. SCHMITT: The building is still there, right.
MR. MCDANIEL: It's a -- I don't know. What is it now? Fleur? Floor? Something like that. [Laughter]
MR. SCHMITT: I could never remember, but yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: And so you stayed at the Lab until still --
MR. SCHMITT: '73.
MR. MCDANIEL: And did you leave to go to work for ORTEC? Is that what you did?
MR. SCHMITT: No.
MR. MCDANIEL: No? What did you do?
MR. SCHMITT: No, I left to join and run, actually, Environmental Systems Corporation. Now that was a company that was formed by some UT people, UT researchers or faculty members, and they had a new infrared technology. We won't go into that story, but it looked very promising, and a group of us -- This was in 1967. There's an intermediate step here. In 1967, we sold ORTEC to EG&G, and so that was a nice thing for the stockholders in ORTEC. Some of us that had benefited that way funded the startup of Environmental Systems Corporation. And so there was kind of a group around that thing. And the initial business idea didn't quite work out, but we thought we had some potential, otherwise, but the guy who was the key -- I'd say, the key technical guy, and who sort of ran it -- one of the UT faculty member didn't really want to carry on with it, and so long story short, I went in.
MR. MCDANIEL: You went in.
MR. SCHMITT: I went in and tried to re-strategize it and reform it and all that, and we did, and it grew. It grew quite nicely over a few years, and there we are.
MR. MCDANIEL: There you are. Now, ORTEC. Let's go back to that. It was one of the first, or it may have been the first real technical offshoot company of the Lab in Oak Ridge, wasn't it?
MR. SCHMITT: Well, I don't think so. I don't think so. Chemical Separations predated ORTEC.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. SCHMITT: Yeah. Jack Ferner and I forget who else.
MR. MCDANIEL: When you sold ORTEC to EG&G, how many employees did you have? It was a pretty good sized company by then, wasn't it?
MR. SCHMITT: It was a good sized company, yeah, yeah. Probably a couple hundred.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Wow. That was a good sized company to start out from just the six of you.
MR. SCHMITT: I may be wrong, I'm really not sure about that number, but I think at least it was in that order.
MR. MCDANIEL: But when you left, you went to Environmental Services Group.
MR. SCHMITT: Environmental Systems, yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Environmental Systems, and ran that company for a while.
MR. SCHMITT: For seven years.
MR. MCDANIEL: For seven years, and then you retired? Or did you go on --
MR. SCHMITT: No.
MR. MCDANIEL: You've never retired, have you? You've always got something going on. [Laughter]
MR. SCHMITT: That's - no, no. After seven years, that was like 1980, and at that point, Sam Hearst and I started Atom Sciences, and Sam had developed, in his work at the Lab, he had developed the technology which goes by the name Resonance Ionization Spectroscopy, and basically, it's induced ionization, and then laser spectroscopy, where you can do elemental identification, and so on. But we thought that had some commercial potential, so we set up and did that. That required a lot of money, because what was a lot of money in 1980, I mean it was like -- I think we capitalized that one at about $2 million.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's a lot of money.
MR. SCHMITT: It was a lot of money in 1980, but we were able to get outside funding interest. There was a funding -- There was a funding group. There was a group of investors in New York who really invested most of that money, so we had a lot of help. We had a lot of help, but we got the equipment bought, the Lab set up, and was over there in -- was it Ridgeway Center?
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, exactly.
MR. SCHMITT: Ridgeway Center, you know where that is. Got it going, and the company was probably up to 14 or 15 people, but most of the commercial work we did, or the work for pay up that way, was contract work and developmental in nature. Yeah. The fact is that that technology was probably a little bit ahead of its time, and the market wasn't quite ready for it. We didn't have the match between the market and the technology that actually we thought we had when we formed the company, but the company went on. It went on until not long ago, about 20, 25 years, but finally had to close its doors. So there we are, but --
MR. MCDANIEL: But you've been -- So your history in Oak Ridge was you came to the Lab, was here 20 years or so. Or how long were you at the Lab?
MR. SCHMITT: 19.
MR. MCDANIEL: 19 years, but in the meantime, you kind of got into private industry, in Oak Ridge, since 1960, and you're probably still in that a little bit, aren't you?
MR. SCHMITT: Yeah. [Laughter]
MR. SCHMITT: A little bit. Actually, I sort of turned my interest towards some good volunteer organizations. Well, I was president of ORICL for a couple of years, and on the board for a lot more than that. Most recently, I've been working with Clinch River Home Health, which is a home health organization. It's non-profit, community-owned, but does really, really good things in home health care. Yeah. That's another whole story, but I’ve been working with them for about the last six years, been president for the last two. We have an excellent, wonderful executive director, staff of about 20, including a dozen -- 12, 15 -- nurses.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? So you, eventually, I guess you see some success in business, and that allows you to do some other things that you want to do, and maybe get involved in some non-profits that maybe help give back a little bit. So what's the future hold for you? Do you know?
MR. SCHMITT: Que sera, sera. [Laughter]
MR. SCHMITT: Whatever will be, will be, but no, I tell my kids, there are just too many interesting things in the world to be interested in and to do. Yeah, I guess it's possible to not find them [Laughter] and be bored, but I haven't got there yet.
MR. MCDANIEL: What was life like as a business person in Oak Ridge for the past 50 years? I mean, you know, as a business person. What was -- Oak Ridge, was it a good town to be a business person, to own businesses? Especially, you're in the technical business field, and I imagine you were based in Oak Ridge, but your clients were all around the world.
MR. SCHMITT: Sure, they're all over the world, yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: But as far as being an Oak Ridge business person who ran those kind of companies, what was it like? Or was there advantages or did you think it mattered? Were there any drawbacks?
MR. SCHMITT: Oh, I think the drawback, the drawbacks, are the usual ones we associate with the town itself. In other words, there's not enough shopping, there's -- For a long time, we didn't have entry level housing, and I'm not sure that's better yet, but it could be if we did some of the right things. And, of course, the other thing is you don't have the industrial base or commercial base that you have in big cities, so yeah, we miss that. That just means you have to go further for your supplies or tools or whatever you want. But Knoxville is not all that far away, and it's okay. I guess in the spectrum you've laid out there, Keith, I think you'd have to say it probably doesn't matter a whole lot. I mean, in other words, what that says is that these particular kinds of companies could be located anywhere. Now, the fact of proximity to the Laboratory and to the technical resources that we have here -- both people resources and equipment resources and facilities and all of that, that's very important to a lot of businesses and a lot of industries, and especially some of those that are currently being formed. Look at the Tech 2020 list. I go to their meetings, and I like what I see there. We're gradually developing a community of technology businesses that I think can move the area.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. And I would imagine one of the beneficial things is what I would call the 'brain trust'. In a town like Oak Ridge that has the National Lab, that has the history, and, as you mentioned, the people, and some of the resources that you might not have at another place, you've also come along with those smart people that are here [Laughter]. So I'm sure that's a resource to draw on, occasionally, as well.
MR. SCHMITT: Yep, yep.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, all right. Is there anything else you want to talk about? Here's your chance.
MR. SCHMITT: [Laughter] Here's my chance.
MR. MCDANIEL: They say this interview will last a lot longer than you and me both, so if there's anything you've ever wanted to say, here's your opportunity.
MR. SCHMITT: Oh, I don't know, Keith. I don't have -- I really don't have that much to say, except to the degree that it might help. I think if we can encourage our younger generation to think about and exercise the creativity that's innate in us all, and exercise that, think about what you can do in the world, and of course that translates to something you might do in entrepreneurship and getting businesses started. That's how it gets out there. The national labs and so on are wonderful for research, but for getting something out commercially, you need entrepreneurship and you need businesses, and all of the talents that go into formation of businesses. And I just like to encourage that for our younger generation.
MR. MCDANIEL: All right, well, thank you very much.
MR. SCHMITT: Thank you.
MR. MCDANIEL: All right.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
***[Editor’s Note: At Mr. Schmitt’s request some revisions have been made to this transcript.]***
***[Reference Note: Please see for more information: The ORTEC Story- Early Years: Origin and Formation of the Enterprise; Building the Enterprise, written by Mr. Harold Schmitt, August 2005.]***

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ORAL HISTORY OF HAROLD SCHMITT
Interviewed by Keith McDaniel
March 12, 2012
MR. MCDANIEL: This is Keith McDaniel, and today is March the 12th, 2012, and I am in the home of Mr. Harold Schmitt, or Hal, I guess, as people know you. Hal, thank you so much for letting us come in and talk to you.
MR. SCHMITT: Glad to be here. Glad to have you, Keith.
MR. MCDANIEL: Thank you. I usually like to start at the very beginning, learn something about someone's history and their past and let's start at -- Tell me where you were born and raised and something about your family.
MR. SCHMITT: Well, I'm a native Texan. I was born in Seguin, Texas, little town about 30 miles from San Antonio, in South Texas. It’s an agricultural community. Population when I was growing up was about 4,000. [Laughter]
MR. MCDANIEL: Seguin is the name of it?
MR. SCHMITT: Seguin is the name of it. S-E-G-U-I-N. Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: So it's a small Texas farming town, then.
MR. SCHMITT: Pretty much.
MR. MCDANIEL: Or ranching town, I should say.
MR. SCHMITT: My dad was a manager of the milling company there. It was a flour and feed mill, and they bought grain from the surrounding farmers and others and made flour and feed, and sold it to the retail stores.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, what year were you born?
MR. SCHMITT: I was born in 1928, August 11, 1928.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you were a Depression child, weren't you?
MR. SCHMITT: I was a Depression child.
MR. SCHMITT: And we knew it. Oh, yeah. The name of the game in those days was to save money and to economize just wherever you could.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Now what about your father, when he was at the -- Did the mill continue to operate?
MR. SCHMITT: Yes it did, yes it did, and being in food-related stuff, it was more or less Depression-resistant. Not completely, of course, but --
MR. MCDANIEL: Everybody had to eat.
MR. SCHMITT: Everybody had to eat, and he was glad to be in that business.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I bet he was. Did he grow up on a farm? I mean did he --
MR. SCHMITT: Yes, he did. He grew up on a small farm in that general area.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right? Okay. So you were in, you said 30 miles south of -
MR. SCHMITT: No, 30 miles east of San Antonio.
MR. MCDANIEL: I guess you got used to the heat, didn't you?
MR. SCHMITT: Oh, yeah, sure. [Laughter]
MR. MCDANIEL: Those hot Texas summers.
MR. SCHMITT: Yes, indeed.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you grew up. Did you have brothers and sisters?
MR. SCHMITT: I did not. I was the only child. Those were Depression days, and a lot of small families. My dad was one of five brothers, and between them, they had seven children.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really? Oh, wow.
MR. SCHMITT: So not many.
MR. MCDANIEL: Not many. So where did you go to school?
MR. SCHMITT: Went to school in Seguin. Grade school initially. In those days, we had seven years in grade school and four years in high school, so it was an 11 year system, not 12 year system like we have now. But he had a wonderful opportunity for him to go to Dallas, in a management position there, and did. That was the summer of 1944, the summer before my senior year in high school. So I had my last year in Dallas at North Dallas High School, and I graduated there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see, I see. So Dallas was the big city for a country boy, wasn't it?
MR. SCHMITT: Yeah. [Laughter] When I first saw their course catalog, I was overwhelmed. It was a tabloid-sized kind of newspaper thing, with course listings in fine print over all those pages, and I thought, "My goodness."
MR. MCDANIEL: For the high school?
MR. SCHMITT: For the high school.
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow. Now, how many students were, let's say, in your graduating class at North Dallas?
MR. SCHMITT: At North Dallas, in graduating class, were about -- I'd have to think. There were about 2,000 students in the high school, and probably 400 and something, maybe 500.
MR. MCDANIEL: 400 or 500, maybe something like that, which was significantly bigger than the school at Seguin.
MR. SCHMITT: My graduating class in Seguin -- and I've been back to a couple of reunions, but -- my graduating class there was about 60.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
[Laughter]
MR. MCDANIEL: Wow, so your family moved to Dallas?
MR. SCHMITT: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: And went to North Dallas High School and you graduated there in what year?
MR. SCHMITT: In 1945.
MR. MCDANIEL: 1945, so the war was going on when you were in high school.
MR. SCHMITT: The war was going on while I was in high school, and I have to say, those were very patriotic times, and all us high school boys were frustrated, because we weren't old enough to go into the military. Everybody wanted to go into the military, and that was kind of an interesting time.
MR. MCDANIEL: So what were your plans after high school? Did you plan to join the military, or go to college, or…?
MR. SCHMITT: Well, no. There was an opportunity for me to go to Southern Methodist University, which is in Dallas, and I did. I did go there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now how did that come about? Did you have a scholarship?
MR. SCHMITT: Yes, I had a scholarship. It was a competitive scholarship for seniors in Dallas. So, I had a scholarship to go there and I started in the Engineering College. Started out to be an engineer. Decided after one semester I really didn't want to be in engineering, and much preferred the science part of it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. SCHMITT: Yes, and I changed my major over to Physics.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you went to -- Did you go right into college after high school?
MR. SCHMITT: Yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: So the fall of '45?
MR. SCHMITT: Yes, I did.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is when you -- So I imagine that there was a big change in the country between your senior year of high school and your freshman year of college, because that's when the war ended.
MR. SCHMITT: Absolutely.
MR. MCDANIEL: Or right in that time.
MR. SCHMITT: Absolutely. Well, it did. It ended, of course, in the summer of '45, and the world was different. The main thing that affected college life, then, was the returning veteran population. People who had served in the military, and there was the GI Bill, which brought a lot of them back to college. And so the colleges were overloaded. As a matter of fact, in SMU's case, some of the -- They didn't really have all the student help that they needed, and so they were glad when somebody came along that was willing to help grade papers or do any of the menial stuff. [Laughter]
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly. The professors are too busy to do.
MR. SCHMITT: But they had their hands full dealing with all the veterans that came back.
MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure. I'm sure they did. So after your first year of engineering, you decided that you liked science. What was it about science that attracted you?
MR. SCHMITT: What about science? Well, probably what attracts most people into science. You want to know how the world works [Laughter]. You think you have an opportunity maybe to find out some things, and do some things, that advance knowledge a little bit. That was the thing. Also, the Head of the Physics Department offered me a part-time job while I was a student there [Laughter] at SMU. That probably had something to do with it. I liked him, and he was tough. He was a tough academician, but I liked him, and worked for him for probably a year. Because I didn't start till after my freshman year.
MR. MCDANIEL: Fix your tie for me there a little bit. Just -- It'll look nicer that way.
MR. SCHMITT: Thank you. Sure.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you worked for him in the Science Department I suppose? Now, you know this was the birth of the Atomic Age. The world found out about Oak Ridge in the summer of '45 -- the nuclear weapon, things such as that. Was that any -- Did that contribute to your interest in science? Were you interested in that?
MR. SCHMITT: I don't think that did, particularly, Keith, but I did begin to develop an interest in the nuclear side of science, and what is this about nuclei and how do they go together and all the usual stuff we talk about.
MR. MCDANIEL: And I'm sure over time, those things were starting --
MR. SCHMITT: To develop.
MR. MCDANIEL: -- to develop, too, and people were starting to study it and learn more about it and things such as that, so that was probably just a natural progression.
MR. SCHMITT: It was kind of a natural progression for me, yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you graduated from SMU.
MR. SCHMITT: No, I didn't.
MR. MCDANIEL: No, you didn't. Okay, well tell me.
MR. SCHMITT: I only had two years there. I played tennis while I was at SMU. [Laughter]
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see, I see.
MR. SCHMITT: That was in my second year. Was never a championship player, but was good enough to letter. [Laughter]
MR. MCDANIEL: There you go.
MR. SCHMITT: Anyway, yeah, so --
MR. MCDANIEL: But you left SMU?
MR. SCHMITT: So I left SMU after two years and went to the University of Texas, and essentially finished everything there.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, where was the University of Texas?
MR. SCHMITT: University of Texas was in Austin. It's the main campus. And I got a -- I actually got my first bachelor's degree in 1948, with a mathematics major, and then they had a degree called B.S. in Physics -- bachelors of science in physics -- and got that degree in '49, master's degree in '52, and Ph.D. in '54, all from the University of Texas.
MR. MCDANIEL: So did you stay there the whole time to do all that work? I'm sure you stayed there to get your master's.
MR. SCHMITT: Through master's. And then, I had an opportunity in one of the -- actually, one of the first co-op programs between the DOE labs and a university. And I was able to finish my coursework at UT, Austin, and then go to Los Alamos to do my dissertation, to participate in one of the experimental physics groups out there. Yeah. I did my dissertation there and finished the Ph.D.
MR. MCDANIEL: What was your dissertation on?
MR. SCHMITT: My dissertation was on the ionization-- energy ionization relationships for fission fragments. And the reason that was important was because ionization chambers were used so much in detection of nuclear particles overall, but fission fragments in particular, and there was not much known about that relationship, so--
MR. MCDANIEL: So did you do groundbreaking work? Was it considered -- [Laughter]
MR. SCHMITT: I wouldn't call it that.
MR. MCDANIEL: It was interesting though, wasn't it?
MR. SCHMITT: But it was interesting, and it confirmed a number of people's speculation that there was what's called an ionization defect. No point in getting too technical here, but what was called an ionization defect was suspected by people, and my thesis was to make measurements, make direct measurements, that would essentially confirm or deny that that was real. So we did that.
MR. MCDANIEL: So it was a small step forward in science.
MR. SCHMITT: It was a small step, yes.
MR. MCDANIEL: But it was a step forward.
MR. SCHMITT: It was a step forward.
MR. MCDANIEL: At least you confirmed it, you know? [Laughter]
MR. SCHMITT: That's right, that's right. Yeah, common wisdom is that if you can add a little drop to the bucket of knowledge, you have accomplished something.
MR. MCDANIEL: And a lot of those drops turn into something measurable, I suppose. So you went to Los Alamos, where you worked and finished your dissertation.
MR. SCHMITT: Yes, I did.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, how long were you at Los Alamos? And tell me something about what you were doing there.
MR. SCHMITT: Well, okay. My dissertation involved the study of fission, and the way you make fission, of course, is with neutrons, so I worked at the reactor sites in Los Alamos for my dissertation. I had had summer jobs at Los Alamos. My first summer job was in 1949, after I got my bachelor's degree, and I just applied -- They had started a summer program, I think the year before, maybe two years before, and brought students there from essentially all over the country. Well, I was fortunate to get one of those positions in the summer of '49, and then ended up going, in the summers of '49, '50, and '51. But what I did during those summer jobs was, I worked with a test group in high explosives, and I learned about high explosives [Laughter]. I learned more about explosives than I wanted to know, but it was fascinating. Oh yeah, really fascinating work.
MR. MCDANIEL: Was it, really?
MR. SCHMITT: Oh, yeah, really fascinating. The name of the game, and at that time, in that connection, was to make the bomb smaller, smaller in size than the first versions. The earlier ones were like 60 inches in diameter, overall. The goal was to try to make tactical weapons that would be maybe the size of a basketball, if you could do that. Well, we got down to maybe half again the size of a basketball [Laughter]. But the group I worked in was a group that tested the components of the high explosive components of the bomb, and it was a very interesting job.
MR. MCDANIEL: I'm sure it was, but once you got there, working on your Ph.D., at least you've been there, you're familiar with the area. You kind of knew what you were getting into.
MR. SCHMITT: Yes, I did.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, how long were you at Los Alamos? You finished your Ph.D.
MR. SCHMITT: Right, and went there full-time in '52. Got my degree in spring of '54, and left in the fall of '54.
MR. MCDANIEL: And where did you go from Los Alamos?
MR. SCHMITT: To Oak Ridge.
MR. MCDANIEL: Tell me about that. What opportunity did you have here?
MR. SCHMITT: Well, like the hundreds of other people, you sort of look around where the jobs are, and what's available. The job in Oak Ridge, the thing that really attracted me here, was I could come and join the Physics Division, and do basic research, and they said, "You can come and start in this group over here." It was associated with the High Voltage Laboratory. So I could start with a group there, but then, essentially, you have freedom to decide your own project and do your own thing. There were not too many of those positions. There were, at the Laboratory, probably 100 or 200 in the Laboratory, in the Physics Division and Chemistry Division and maybe some other places. But I really liked that idea. I liked the idea of coming to a place that had just wonderful facilities, experimental facilities, and I could do some experiments and things that I had had ideas for back during my thesis research. And after I'd been here a year or so, was encouraged to do that, by Art Snell, who was Physics Division Director at that time.
MR. MCDANIEL: So what did you have to do? Did you have to put together a proposal, and present it?
MR. SCHMITT: No, things were much easier in that respect in those days. Yeah. The administrative stuff really was taken care of pretty much by the administrators, and we were told, "Your job is to do good science."
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. SCHMITT: That's right. Very appealing to a young physicist.
MR. MCDANIEL: I imagine that'd be very appealing to just about anybody, wouldn't it?
MR. SCHMITT: I think so.
MR. MCDANIEL: Especially a young, imaginative scientist who had lots of ideas. So, well, good. So you came here in the fall of '54. And you probably started kind of your own kind of research a year or so later.
MR. SCHMITT: That's right.
MR. MCDANIEL: How long did that last and what did you do? Tell me something about that.
MR. SCHMITT: Well, that lasted 19 years [Laughter].
MR. MCDANIEL: Did it really? Okay. Until about '73 or so.
MR. SCHMITT: About '73.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, and you had opportunities to do a lot of different types of research.
MR. SCHMITT: Lot of different things. I got very interested in -- Let me say, most of that. Two things. The first part, we did some interesting neutron capture studies, neutron capture cross-sections, that had a relationship to the Big Bang Theory and the way elements were formed at the formation of the universe. So those -- I mean those cross-sections were useful, at least in that respect, as well as in some practical things, too. Besides which, there were nuclear theories that related to that, and made some predictions that mostly other people took the data and created the early part that could be tested. Then, I got interested in the physics of the fission process, in other words, what actually happens when a nucleus fissions? There were two --
MR. MCDANIEL: And for those non-scientists who are watching this, explain what fission is.
MR. SCHMITT: Nuclear fission is the splitting of a heavy nucleus. As a matter of fact, in general, it just means the splitting of a nucleus, usually into two fragments. That's really all it means, but as a practical matter, it occurs mostly with heavy elements, and when you get heavy enough, you can have spontaneous fission. That is where some of the time, a nucleus just decides to split, and does so. It happens in Californium 252 for example is a common fission source. Anyway, you can induce nuclear fission with thermal neutrons, and we did that with the U-235, U-233, plutonium 239, and other elements. So anyway, the physics I was interested in was how the nucleus splits, and there were two major theories. One was that the nucleus is just -- when you excite it, for example, with a neutron -- that it is so hot that it just blows apart. And it happens to blow apart in two pieces. But there was another theory, and the other theory was that a nucleus deforms a little bit more slowly than that, and like a liquid drop, and just gradually necks down and --
MR. MCDANIEL: And then separates, sure.
MR. SCHMITT: -- and then splits. Now, John Wheeler, whose name people may know, and Niels Bohr, developed the liquid drop model for fission. That was fine, and it gave about the right energetics, and so on. But its problem was that it predicted a roughly symmetric mass distribution. That is, it predicted a ratio of fragment masses that was about one. And that was a problem, because the observed mass distributions had very asymmetric peaks. So the other theory was, "Okay, there must be some fragment shell effects." These so-called nuclear shell effects that take hold and cause a conglomeration of protons and neutrons into these asymmetric configurations. Well, anyway --
MR. MCDANIEL: So they were different. So they ended up being different sizes.
MR. SCHMITT: They're in different sizes. So we -- I thought this would be an interesting field to study, and we studied that six ways from Sunday. [Laughter] A lot of really interesting experiments. We ended up with, from that group in the Physics Department, probably 80 or so publications in that field. Yeah, so it turned out to be very, very beneficial.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, I want to go back, because we've got you up to about '73 or so. I know you made a big change in your life in '73, or thereabouts. So, let's go back and talk about your family. Now, when you were in Texas, were you married?
MR. SCHMITT: No, Jonell and I got married in 1952. I better get that right [Laughter]. 1952. May of '52.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you were at Los Alamos?
MR. SCHMITT: I had gone to Los Alamos at the beginning of the year, and we knew we were going to get married. We got married in May, and set up housekeeping there, and had our first few years in Los Alamos.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, where did you meet your wife?
MR. SCHMITT: I met her at the University. I was in graduate school. She was actually working at the University at that time.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you all -- Now, so you came to Oak Ridge, you said, in '54, fall of '54. Now, did you all have children when you came to Oak Ridge?
MR. SCHMITT: No, no, we did not. We had our first child in '57 -- 1957.
MR. MCDANIEL: So when you came to Oak Ridge, where did you live?
MR. SCHMITT: We lived in the Garden Apartments.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, did you?
MR. SCHMITT: Matter of fact, had our first two children there, '57 and let me think about that now. Yeah, '57 and '60. And in January, '61, we moved into this house, which we had built during the calendar year of 1960.
MR. MCDANIEL: So in '61, you moved into where you are now?
MR. SCHMITT: Yep.
MR. MCDANIEL: Now, did you have more children? Or did you just have the two?
MR. SCHMITT: We had our third daughter in 1963. So '57, '60, and '63.
MR. MCDANIEL: And they grew up in Oak Ridge, went through the school system, and --
MR. SCHMITT: Grew up in Oak Ridge, very proud graduates of the Oak Ridge High School.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, good, good. I mean what -- And we'll get back here to your work in a minute, but let's talk a little bit more about that. I mean, what was Oak Ridge like to live in in the ‘60s and ‘70s, because that's really -- Well, the late ‘50s through --
MR. SCHMITT: Late ‘50s onward? You know, course we had lived in Los Alamos, and there are a lot of similarities in the communities between Oak Ridge and Los Alamos, so we were more or less used to the various governmental aspects of the town.
MR. MCDANIEL: And the educated folks and what they bring to a community. There's so much that they bring, so I'm sure it was similar of Los Alamos as it was in Oak Ridge.
MR. SCHMITT: It was. And Oak Ridge -- probably still is, but in those days, it was a stimulating town to live in, because there were all these interesting things going on, whatever you talked about with anybody was interesting. When you're young, you're like a sponge, and you just absorb all that. And we did. Jonell is a journalist, and she worked for a while at the News Sentinel, actually, and then got pregnant with our first child, and so she left that work, much later went back to work at the Oak Ridger. It was as editor of the entertainment section for probably eight years or so, seven or eight years. Then, left that, but then still later, went back as a copy editor. So she's kind of inbred in the Oak Ridger system.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure, I understand. Well, good. And I'm sure there were lots of opportunities for your children in Oak Ridge to do different things. Arts and athletics, and all those kinds of things.
MR. SCHMITT: And we try to encourage them to follow their interests and do what they were interested in.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right, now, where are your children now?
MR. SCHMITT: We have one in Atlanta, one in Dallas, and one in Orange County, California. [Laughter]
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right? Are any of them scientists? Did any of them follow in your footsteps?
MR. SCHMITT: No, they did not. They chose not to go into a scientific field. Don't know why. I think they just didn't develop that interest. We tried to encourage -- I tried to encourage them, but not too hard. I mean because I really wanted them to develop their own interests, and they did. Carol, our oldest, is, was, but till she retired, or left -- actually, she left. But she was a teacher, and she taught mathematics and French. She had three children. And Laine, our middle one, is a public relations person. She went into advertising and became sort of -- well, had a career in Atlanta, in the planning side of advertising. She had two kids. And Joy became an attorney, and after a while, she worked in the corporate law department of J.C. Penney for a while, about six or seven years, and then decided she liked the idea of running her own business. So she got out of that, bought two franchises, and went into that. She, in the meantime, had her own family, her own two kids.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well good, good. Now, let's go back to your professional career. In the early ‘70s, things started -- You started discovering some things at your job that kind of influenced your future, so talk a little bit about that.
MR. SCHMITT: Well, you know that we formed the company ORTEC in -- that was 1960 that we formed that company.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's right, well, let's go back to when you formed that. Yeah. Exactly.
MR. SCHMITT: Yeah, and that sort of came out of our work with nuclear fission, because we were, as part of that work, we were developing new kinds of detectors and trying new things and these semi-conductor detectors just showed enormous promise for our field, but also for other fields, various places. People started using them. In my group, we started making detectors for any research group that wanted them. Finally got really got kind of overloaded with that. Well, you know this story.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, but I want you to tell it. Tell what happened. I want to hear how you got overloaded with that, and then you tried to -- what you tried to do and kind of how ORTEC came to be because of that. I want you to tell me that story.
MR. SCHMITT: Well, that's [Laughter] that was a transitional story, I have to say. Yeah. I had a technician, his name was Dave Peach. I got Dave to sort of be our detector guy. He made the detectors for our experiments and so on. But then, other people in the Physics Division decided, "Hey, they could use these detectors in their experiments," and "Would you make detectors for me?" "Well, sure, of course we would." So we did that. And then we started getting requests from other labs -- Word got out as people published papers, went to conferences and give talks and stuff. The word gets out, so other people wanted these detectors, too, so they would ask us, and we made detectors for them. That all started in the late 50s. After a little while, our lab just got overloaded with those kinds of requests.
MR. MCDANIEL: You were doing more of that than you could with your other work, right?
MR. SCHMITT: Well, our technician certainly could, and we were trying to keep it in balance, but it was getting harder. So upshot, finally I thought, "Well, you know, if I had another technician, then we could satisfy those demands as well as our own." So I asked our Division Director, who was Joe Fowler at the time, and I said, "You know, Joe, can we have another technician?" He knew what was going on. Our offices were down the hall from each other, so--
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, exactly.
MR. SCHMITT: But anyway, he said, "Well, sorry, but the Physics Division budget just couldn't -- I'm sorry."
MR. MCDANIEL: No, you're good.
MR. SCHMITT: Physics Division budget just couldn't accommodate another technician, and could we find another way to do it? Well, the obvious thing to do is to get the Instrumentation Division involved, the Instrumentation and Controls Division, who were making detectors of all kinds for the other groups in the Lab. So I asked them, and bottom line of that story was that they didn't want to get involved. They thought the detectors were just a flash in the pan, and they didn't want to be involved. Well, it was okay. They had their own fish to fry. [Laughter] So, that was about it for trying to get detectors made within the Laboratory framework.
MR. MCDANIEL: But there was a huge demand. I mean, it was becoming a nuclear lab, and all over, really, from -- You're getting it from other labs and other people.
MR. SCHMITT: We never really looked at it as a business. I looked at it during all that period. I looked at it as a service that the Laboratory could do for science, nationwide, or even worldwide. Anyway, so that didn't work. Finally, my close colleague and friend John Neiler and I talked about it, and we said, "You know, maybe we could just start a company." Well, first we thought about getting detectors made outside, but then we realized, "Okay, whoever we got to make these detectors, we would have to supervise so closely, because there were some intricate steps in there, and all of that." And we said, "As long as we are going to have to supervise anyway, let's just start a little company off to the side here, and see if we can meet the demand that way. Well, anyway, so John and I talked about it, and we said, "Okay." But then there was a group, six of us actually, that ate lunch pretty regularly together out there at ORNL. And we said, "Let's just talk to the group about it." So, okay, we did. And everybody said, "Oh, that's a good idea," and they immediately recognized the problems about having the detectors made in house. So, they were very sympathetic, but enthusiastic for maybe trying to work on it, and they encouraged us, but I thought -- and I guess we all thought, really -- that we ought to get management's blessing, because you have to remember, in those days -- this is now 1959 or so, '60 -- we belonged to the Laboratory, essentially body and soul, you know?
MR. MCDANIEL: And the work that you did at the Laboratory belonged to the Laboratory.
MR. SCHMITT: And the work we did, absolutely. And we took that enthusiastically. That was not a reluctant thing at all. Because we liked belonging to the Lab, and all of that. But we realized that this was a little bit out of the ordinary, a little bit offline, and so let's ask the management about it. So the first thing we did --
MR. MCDANIEL: And let me just interrupt. This was before the concept of technology transfer, wasn't it?
MR. SCHMITT: Oh, this was long before. Nobody had even heard of technology transfer. [Laughter]
MR. SCHMITT: So first thing was that we talked to Joe Fowler, who was our Division Director, and Joe said, "Golly." He said, "I don't know, you better go talk to the Director's Office." He directed us to Mansel Ramsey, who was an associate director -- I think his title was Associate Director for Administration or something like that. Nice guy. But anyway. So we went to see him. We went to see Mansel, and he said, "I don't think there'd be any problem with that." He said, "We have electricians who have their own business off on the side." He just sort of reeled off some examples of people that had side businesses that had nothing to do with Laboratory employment. And we said we'd make it clear we'll have nothing to do with employment. We won't use Laboratory facilities. And whether or not ORNL buys any of these things won’t matter; we don't care. Anyways, so Mansel said he didn't think there'd be a problem, but he'd like to get it legally reviewed. So we said, "Sure, of course." Well, we kind of expected that. He asked us to write it out, write up a plan sort of thing, so we did that. It wasn't very complicated, and our ideas weren't that well formulated anyway. So he said, "Okay, I'll take this and we'll get it reviewed." And he did. I asked for, in our request, I asked for a written response, so that we'd have it in the file that this was okay, because I didn't want either me or any of us involved to get fired because [Laughter] we had done something that was against Laboratory policy and what have you. Mansel said that he didn't think that would be a problem, but he would talk to the lawyers. He came back and said he had talked to the lawyers. The lawyers said, "It's okay," but they wouldn't send a written response, so I wrote a letter and said, "Now, we understand…" You get the idea. So, long and short of that was that the lawyer in the Corporate Legal Department wrote us a letter anyway, saying it was all okay. [Laughter]
MR. MCDANIEL: Good, good, that's great. Did you ever need that letter later?
MR. SCHMITT: No, no. No, really never did.
MR. MCDANIEL: Probably, by this time, the people that needed to know knew what was going on.
MR. SCHMITT: I think so, yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you had this idea to start this business, and you and your friend, your colleague, and then the four others -- your lunch buddies -- you decided to -- You got your permission, and then what happened?
MR. SCHMITT: Then, we said okay, well, then, if we're going to do this, we have to first of all get some money, because we're going to have to buy some supplies and all of that.
MR. MCDANIEL: And where were you going to do it? You know you had to have a place.
MR. SCHMITT: Have to have a place.
MR. MCDANIEL: This is something you guys were doing part-time, after work, I imagine.
MR. SCHMITT: Oh it was, or weekends.
MR. MCDANIEL: You didn't have any -- Yeah, that’s what I mean, weekends.
MR. SCHMITT: Evenings and weekends. Yeah, it was an evenings and weekend activity.
MR. MCDANIEL: So how did you raise your money, and how much did you need?
MR. SCHMITT: Well, we actually got Jim Blankenship, who was working on detectors in the I and C Division. He couldn't come in because of a prohibition on investment by employees of that division. But he helped us form a budget, before he knew that that would happen. He helped us form a budget, and we looked at that, and when it turned out he couldn't join in with us, we got John Walter interested, and John said sure. He looked at the budget and he said, "Yeah, that'll work." And that budget was $14,000.00.
MR. MCDANIEL: $14,000.00 in 1959. That was a lot of money in 1959.
MR. SCHMITT: It was a lot of money, yeah. It was a lot of money, but it was doable, and we figured we'd make it even more doable, so we set up $500.00 investments, and anybody could come in.
MR. MCDANIEL: Anybody could come in, right.
MR. SCHMITT: Well, yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: How'd that go?
MR. SCHMITT: That went--
MR. MCDANIEL: That went well?
MR. SCHMITT: Yeah, yeah, not 100 percent smoothly, because you remember the culture. The culture was that association with business and industry was kind of dirty. That was a little bit suspect, if you did that.
MR. MCDANIEL: So did you have some backlash from colleagues and people that worked?
MR. SCHMITT: Yeah, but it wasn't terribly bad. Oh, there were people who thought it was terrible that this could be done or would be done, that anybody would do that.
MR. MCDANIEL: What was their argument?
MR. SCHMITT: There were people who knew. There were people who really -- But at least nobody campaigned, I'll put it that way. Maybe had discussions out somewhere, and occasionally would hear about something, but nobody campaigned against us, and we just sort of went on. We didn't try to persuade people away from their viewpoint. We just accepted it and went on, went on to other people. But there were 29 people who were willing to invest $500.00 toward it [Laughter].
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, well that's good, that's good.
MR. SCHMITT: Yeah, and so that's how we got started.
MR. MCDANIEL: And ORTEC. You came up with -- How'd the name ORTEC come to be?
MR. SCHMITT: Of course, that was funny. In this group of six, everybody had all kinds of ideas for names. We never could find anything. We wanted something that would give us an umbrella name, but still not be too cute. Would be eye-catching, maybe, but not be too cute and all that. Make a long story short, at one of our little lunch gatherings, John Neiler came up with the idea of Oak Ridge Technical Enterprises Corporation. ORTEC. Oak Ridge Technical Enterprises Corporation.
MR. MCDANIEL: So that gave you kind of an umbrella in case you wanted to do other things, later on, down the road --
MR. SCHMITT: And we actually talked about that, because we had some other ideas for products and so on, and especially if the detector business didn't really materialize, which, of course, it did.
MR. MCDANIEL: Of course. So you started this in 1960. Where did you do your work, when you first started?
MR. SCHMITT: At 901 Turnpike [Laughter].
MR. MCDANIEL: 901 Turnpike. Where was that?
MR. SCHMITT: That's now the Turnell -- What --
MR. MCDANIEL: Tunnell. The Tunnell Building.
MR. SCHMITT: Thank you. Right.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you started there.
MR. SCHMITT: We had started in two rooms, which we had to renovate and fix up with water and plumbing and electricity and all of that. Ken Thermond was the managing partner of the partnership that owned the building, and Ken was a good landlord.
MR. MCDANIEL: Was he?
MR. SCHMITT: Yeah, he was. We worked all that stuff out. We worked out a deal with him where he would -- Actually, he put in the plumbing, but we paid for it over a year with increased rent and then the rent would drop back after the first year.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, well good. That's good. Now, so, did all six of you work nights and weekends and --
MR. SCHMITT: Pretty much, yep. Pretty much, and we'd divide -- We had a division of labor. I mean we had two guys who were concentrating on the sales aspect and developing customer lists and so on. Two guys who worked on the production and production aspects of the detectors, and two others who were engineers -- one worked on the electronics, and one worked on the mechanics. So we had it pretty well covered. My job was to catch whatever fell between the cracks, and then try to keep it coordinated and watch the budget and all that stuff.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure, sure. So, how long did that go on like that?
MR. SCHMITT: Well, let's see. June to -- It went on for about a year, but June to March, very intensely, and in March 1961 we decided we needed help.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. You needed an employee or two.
MR. SCHMITT: So we hired some -- Yes, we did. We hired some technical employees to actually make the detectors, who we could supervise. And then we began to look for a president, and ultimately found Tom Yount, who came in, did a marvelous job.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you were still working at the Lab?
MR. SCHMITT: I worked at the Lab all through that.
MR. MCDANIEL: All through that whole process. Okay. Now, and then eventually, eventually, ORTEC grew and you started developing other businesses.
MR. SCHMITT: John Neiler actually left the Laboratory to become Vice-President and Technical Director in ORTEC, and Tom Emmer left to do the electronics in ORTEC. John Walter left to do detectors, and do that side of it. The rest of us stayed at the Laboratory. Yeah, we did.
MR. MCDANIEL: Stayed at the Lab. Now, once you started building your client list, who were your clients? Were other laboratories, universities, research facilities --
MR. SCHMITT: Universities and research facilities, yeah. Yeah, the market for these detectors is a research market. But all kinds of research, so yeah, our customers were -- One of the first ones was Rice University. One of the first ones was one of the GE Labs, I forget which one. Who else? I could look it up.
MR. MCDANIEL: But ORTEC grew, and you eventually built your own building, I suppose, at some point, didn't you?
MR. SCHMITT: Yeah, that's after Tom came and sales were growing and it looked like it was a real business. Yeah, then we built the ORTEC building, which is out there at the corner of Illinois and Lafayette.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is the building still there?
MR. SCHMITT: The building is still there, right.
MR. MCDANIEL: It's a -- I don't know. What is it now? Fleur? Floor? Something like that. [Laughter]
MR. SCHMITT: I could never remember, but yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: And so you stayed at the Lab until still --
MR. SCHMITT: '73.
MR. MCDANIEL: And did you leave to go to work for ORTEC? Is that what you did?
MR. SCHMITT: No.
MR. MCDANIEL: No? What did you do?
MR. SCHMITT: No, I left to join and run, actually, Environmental Systems Corporation. Now that was a company that was formed by some UT people, UT researchers or faculty members, and they had a new infrared technology. We won't go into that story, but it looked very promising, and a group of us -- This was in 1967. There's an intermediate step here. In 1967, we sold ORTEC to EG&G, and so that was a nice thing for the stockholders in ORTEC. Some of us that had benefited that way funded the startup of Environmental Systems Corporation. And so there was kind of a group around that thing. And the initial business idea didn't quite work out, but we thought we had some potential, otherwise, but the guy who was the key -- I'd say, the key technical guy, and who sort of ran it -- one of the UT faculty member didn't really want to carry on with it, and so long story short, I went in.
MR. MCDANIEL: You went in.
MR. SCHMITT: I went in and tried to re-strategize it and reform it and all that, and we did, and it grew. It grew quite nicely over a few years, and there we are.
MR. MCDANIEL: There you are. Now, ORTEC. Let's go back to that. It was one of the first, or it may have been the first real technical offshoot company of the Lab in Oak Ridge, wasn't it?
MR. SCHMITT: Well, I don't think so. I don't think so. Chemical Separations predated ORTEC.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. SCHMITT: Yeah. Jack Ferner and I forget who else.
MR. MCDANIEL: When you sold ORTEC to EG&G, how many employees did you have? It was a pretty good sized company by then, wasn't it?
MR. SCHMITT: It was a good sized company, yeah, yeah. Probably a couple hundred.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? Wow. That was a good sized company to start out from just the six of you.
MR. SCHMITT: I may be wrong, I'm really not sure about that number, but I think at least it was in that order.
MR. MCDANIEL: But when you left, you went to Environmental Services Group.
MR. SCHMITT: Environmental Systems, yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Environmental Systems, and ran that company for a while.
MR. SCHMITT: For seven years.
MR. MCDANIEL: For seven years, and then you retired? Or did you go on --
MR. SCHMITT: No.
MR. MCDANIEL: You've never retired, have you? You've always got something going on. [Laughter]
MR. SCHMITT: That's - no, no. After seven years, that was like 1980, and at that point, Sam Hearst and I started Atom Sciences, and Sam had developed, in his work at the Lab, he had developed the technology which goes by the name Resonance Ionization Spectroscopy, and basically, it's induced ionization, and then laser spectroscopy, where you can do elemental identification, and so on. But we thought that had some commercial potential, so we set up and did that. That required a lot of money, because what was a lot of money in 1980, I mean it was like -- I think we capitalized that one at about $2 million.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's a lot of money.
MR. SCHMITT: It was a lot of money in 1980, but we were able to get outside funding interest. There was a funding -- There was a funding group. There was a group of investors in New York who really invested most of that money, so we had a lot of help. We had a lot of help, but we got the equipment bought, the Lab set up, and was over there in -- was it Ridgeway Center?
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, exactly.
MR. SCHMITT: Ridgeway Center, you know where that is. Got it going, and the company was probably up to 14 or 15 people, but most of the commercial work we did, or the work for pay up that way, was contract work and developmental in nature. Yeah. The fact is that that technology was probably a little bit ahead of its time, and the market wasn't quite ready for it. We didn't have the match between the market and the technology that actually we thought we had when we formed the company, but the company went on. It went on until not long ago, about 20, 25 years, but finally had to close its doors. So there we are, but --
MR. MCDANIEL: But you've been -- So your history in Oak Ridge was you came to the Lab, was here 20 years or so. Or how long were you at the Lab?
MR. SCHMITT: 19.
MR. MCDANIEL: 19 years, but in the meantime, you kind of got into private industry, in Oak Ridge, since 1960, and you're probably still in that a little bit, aren't you?
MR. SCHMITT: Yeah. [Laughter]
MR. SCHMITT: A little bit. Actually, I sort of turned my interest towards some good volunteer organizations. Well, I was president of ORICL for a couple of years, and on the board for a lot more than that. Most recently, I've been working with Clinch River Home Health, which is a home health organization. It's non-profit, community-owned, but does really, really good things in home health care. Yeah. That's another whole story, but I’ve been working with them for about the last six years, been president for the last two. We have an excellent, wonderful executive director, staff of about 20, including a dozen -- 12, 15 -- nurses.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right? So you, eventually, I guess you see some success in business, and that allows you to do some other things that you want to do, and maybe get involved in some non-profits that maybe help give back a little bit. So what's the future hold for you? Do you know?
MR. SCHMITT: Que sera, sera. [Laughter]
MR. SCHMITT: Whatever will be, will be, but no, I tell my kids, there are just too many interesting things in the world to be interested in and to do. Yeah, I guess it's possible to not find them [Laughter] and be bored, but I haven't got there yet.
MR. MCDANIEL: What was life like as a business person in Oak Ridge for the past 50 years? I mean, you know, as a business person. What was -- Oak Ridge, was it a good town to be a business person, to own businesses? Especially, you're in the technical business field, and I imagine you were based in Oak Ridge, but your clients were all around the world.
MR. SCHMITT: Sure, they're all over the world, yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: But as far as being an Oak Ridge business person who ran those kind of companies, what was it like? Or was there advantages or did you think it mattered? Were there any drawbacks?
MR. SCHMITT: Oh, I think the drawback, the drawbacks, are the usual ones we associate with the town itself. In other words, there's not enough shopping, there's -- For a long time, we didn't have entry level housing, and I'm not sure that's better yet, but it could be if we did some of the right things. And, of course, the other thing is you don't have the industrial base or commercial base that you have in big cities, so yeah, we miss that. That just means you have to go further for your supplies or tools or whatever you want. But Knoxville is not all that far away, and it's okay. I guess in the spectrum you've laid out there, Keith, I think you'd have to say it probably doesn't matter a whole lot. I mean, in other words, what that says is that these particular kinds of companies could be located anywhere. Now, the fact of proximity to the Laboratory and to the technical resources that we have here -- both people resources and equipment resources and facilities and all of that, that's very important to a lot of businesses and a lot of industries, and especially some of those that are currently being formed. Look at the Tech 2020 list. I go to their meetings, and I like what I see there. We're gradually developing a community of technology businesses that I think can move the area.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, right. And I would imagine one of the beneficial things is what I would call the 'brain trust'. In a town like Oak Ridge that has the National Lab, that has the history, and, as you mentioned, the people, and some of the resources that you might not have at another place, you've also come along with those smart people that are here [Laughter]. So I'm sure that's a resource to draw on, occasionally, as well.
MR. SCHMITT: Yep, yep.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, all right. Is there anything else you want to talk about? Here's your chance.
MR. SCHMITT: [Laughter] Here's my chance.
MR. MCDANIEL: They say this interview will last a lot longer than you and me both, so if there's anything you've ever wanted to say, here's your opportunity.
MR. SCHMITT: Oh, I don't know, Keith. I don't have -- I really don't have that much to say, except to the degree that it might help. I think if we can encourage our younger generation to think about and exercise the creativity that's innate in us all, and exercise that, think about what you can do in the world, and of course that translates to something you might do in entrepreneurship and getting businesses started. That's how it gets out there. The national labs and so on are wonderful for research, but for getting something out commercially, you need entrepreneurship and you need businesses, and all of the talents that go into formation of businesses. And I just like to encourage that for our younger generation.
MR. MCDANIEL: All right, well, thank you very much.
MR. SCHMITT: Thank you.
MR. MCDANIEL: All right.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
***[Editor’s Note: At Mr. Schmitt’s request some revisions have been made to this transcript.]***
***[Reference Note: Please see for more information: The ORTEC Story- Early Years: Origin and Formation of the Enterprise; Building the Enterprise, written by Mr. Harold Schmitt, August 2005.]***